Phaedrus and Symposium
by LifeInABox66
Summary: Ryou and Bakura race on the harsh brink of infinity, whilst Yugi and Yami Yugi lie entwined in their tranquil haven. A study in duality.


**A/N: A few days ago, I came home, bounced up to Aluminium, saying: "Today, I have discovered two things: firstly, Plato is f*cking **_**fantastic, **_**even if he is absurdly sexist, and secondly, I have a Yu-Gi-Oh plotbunny!" **

**The two things were inexplicably related.**

**I appear to have arrived in the Yu-Gi-Oh fandom. Wilde help me. **

**So, uh, this fic **_**will**_** still make sense even if you haven't read Plato's **_**Phaedrus **_**or **_**Symposium. **_**Particularly if you've listened to **_**The Origin of Love **_**from **_**Hedwig and the Angry Inch, **_**in terms of the second part. However, for the first, you'll be missing out on a fair amount of subtext if you don't know what **_**Phaedrus **_**is about. It isn't integral, but **_**is**_** shippier. **

**(Is this my weirdly twisted way of trying to get people to read Plato? Hum.)**

**So, after some brief consultation with aforementioned sibling, Aluminium, I decided to post this as one chapter rather than two; the two sections are separate, but the one depends so fully on the other that they really have to be on the same page. It's just... symmetrical, I suppose. **

**50% of the innuendo here is intentional. 40% was unintentional, but I decided I kind of liked it anyway, and kept it. 10%... well, there's always 10% that no-one accounted for, isn't there?**

**Phaedrus**

A gush of wind stirs Ryou's hair, grazing his cheeks with cold; a _good _cold, fresh, clear and stinging, as though eradicating a dull film of deception, leaving only truth, or some approximation thereof. The carriage judders chaotically and the reins cut painfully into his hands, chafing along with the cold. He feels himself bounce over his seat. As he does so, the edge of his ankle clashes with Bakura's, in a momentary flash of silent heat. He glances across. Bakura's eyes narrow in a mixture of scorn and mirth, as skilfully he wrestles with the twisting reins.

They jolt erratically, with awe-inspiring speed, over a vast expanse of inky sky. Clouds and stars hurtle past, lost in a maelstrom of light and blur, subsumed by the overwhelmingly rapid pace of the chariot's progression.

Ryou and his companion hold one horse apiece. Ryou's is a stark, ghastly white – a luminous streak in the sky – with a tangled mane that tosses every which way in knotted clumps. He is swift, and oddly obedient, veering sharply in the requisite direction at the slightest twitch of Ryou's fingers, hooves pounding evenly on no surface at all, yet still swamping the area with sound. Navigation would be no trouble, even at this dizzying velocity, were it not for the cackling figure on his left: head flung back in maniacal laughter, Bakura seems to relish every swerve and thud. He clutches at the reins, but for support alone; he refuses to steer, allowing his own horse to dart left and right of its own insane volition. On his side, the horse is midnight black, ragged, gawky and vicious. Foam streams from the corners of its mouth, inflamed by the cut of the bit. It twists the carriage, forcing it in its own, unfathomable directions. Bakura laughs and laughs as though he will never cease laughing, as they plunge into further swirling darkness, like some fragment of crystal in a planet-sized kaleidoscope.

Ryou can barely decide whether he is awe stricken or horrified by his experience – it is all too intense, too chilling_. _Terror mingles with wonder mingles with chaos, and the thud of hooves seems to tear into him with their pressure, a percussive counterpoint to the fluttering of his heart. Bakura's harsh yells are simply another section to the macabre orchestra.

Ryou feels the irresistible urge to _scream _– to tear through the existing noise with one solitary, piercing slice of a shriek. Yet something stifles him, arresting the cry before it can even part his lips. He twists his head madly, struggling to utter some form of sound, to no avail.

They career onwards through the sky, dizzying and directionless under the glowing crescent moon. Ryou finds he has grown half accustomed to the speed – they are no longer driving forwards, but floating, amidst a backdrop of turmoil.

Slowly, he lets the reins drop to his lap. There is a relentless prickling around his arms and shoulder blades, intensifying by the second. Awkwardly, he folds his arms around his stomach, as though trying to compress himself into one small scrap of discomfort. No use – it continues, like a thousand needles piercing the surface of his skin, or the scraping of a thousand miniscule teeth. As though someone is raking his shoulders with a fine tooth comb, leaving red, aching trails in the soft flesh.

He cannot pinpoint the exact moment it progresses from itching to pain – but all of a sudden pain is present, and it is _agonising. _A thousand drills, pushing remorselessly upwards from where they lay dormant beneath his skin. Oh God, it _hurts... _All thoughts of fear and control have dispersed, leaving trails of throbbing pain in their wake. He cannot focus, cannot think... he keels over, with head over his knees, the blunt little ridges of his spine pressuring the skin of his back, just underneath a searing blanket of agony.

Bakura's laughter has ebbed away.

Something is forcing itself out of his shoulders. Something rustles in the hollow of his ear. With effort, he straightens, stretching out an arm.

Emerging from its surface, streaked damp and pink with blood, are the heads of a thousand tiny feathers.

His shoulders ache with a new, alien weight. _Wings - or the beginnings of wings. _

And then he turns, fully, to view Bakura. Bakura, whose face is a mask of trepidation and confusion. Bakura, whose pale hair feathers around his angular face like wings of his very own.

The pain withdraws, like a receding wave.

Ryou sighs softly, in weary relief. The agony is seeping away as though someone has pulled a plug; as though it has found new solace in Bakura's eyes.

In Bakura's eyes, Ryou sees himself.

And he sees shadows. And he sees light. One flowing, continuous braid of _ciaroscuro. _

And Bakura sees him.

The pain has left something behind, or been replaced by some different sensation – not the opposite, not exactly pleasure, nor anything that yields to description.

Ryou proffers his hand. Bakura recoils in disdain, staring icily at the pale, downy skin and blunt, bitten nails as though they are toxic.

Ryou cannot speak.

A new wave of emotion crashes over him – far more powerful than pain, deeper than anything he has ever experienced. Amidst the stars, and the shadows, and the moon which hangs in the air like an emblem, he brushes with the sublime. In one moment, stretched to breaking point, he witnesses a flash of eternity: overwhelming and fathomless; crushing and vast. The world is all at once a plane of infinite space and a pinpoint of narrow bleakness, spanning the intricate caverns of space – then crushed and bound in a nutshell. His mind leaps from hope, to terror, to something beyond all emotion and reason; it feels as though he has been liberated from the structure of his own mind, soaring through immeasurable chambers of chaotic nothingness...

Something has shifted in Bakura's face, impossible to read or interpret.

Ryou beats his new wings, first tentatively, easing through the unfamiliar muscles – then rapidly, gaining momentum. This is barely intentional – more an irrational impulse – yet it happens nonetheless, and suddenly he is floating, flying inches above the chariot...

Insistently, he stretches out an arm towards Bakura, anticipating another scathing, wordless dismissal. Instead, he raises his own hand, slow and feeble, as though coerced by some irresistible compulsion and horrified by his own actions. Nonetheless. Ryou allows their fingertips to collide, and brush vaguely, once, before he has ascended too high to reach. Bakura's head snaps away, abruptly breaking the brief contact forged. The chariot swerves violently to the left, nearly toppling, as Bakura's black horse gleefully overpowers Ryou's riderless white.

Ryou loses sight of the vehicle, and Bakura, as he flutters ever higher, fighting against the strong, opposing force of the air, and against the pain, for the pain has returned and redoubled. Yet it spurs him onwards, prompting him to push with all his might against the numerous, unidentifiable forces which oppress him. He breaks into darkness, gasping for breath, and emerges into light.

"Oh my – spirit!" Ryou clutches helplessly at the tangle of bed sheets which surround him, clawing at the sturdy mattress, and at the golden Ring which hangs like a shackle around his neck. Regaining a sense of the tangible. Sweat beads against his neck, elbows, the backs of his knees. He opens his eyes, to be greeted by semi-darkness, and solid, familiar shapes. But no sign of the uncanny, _un_familiar whom he seeks. "Spirit?" He hesitates, then uses his own name, the stolen name: "B-bakura?"

"Host?" drawls a languid voice from nearby. There sits the spirit, sprawled on the empty edge of mattress, looking remarkably composed for the madman of before.

"I – my – had – dream –" Ryou is not making sense, and he _knows _he is not making sense, but could not manage to supply coherency if the world depended on it.

"Indeed," sneers Bakura. "Couldn't have put it better myself."

"You – were there?" It is – it is _almost _a question.

He falls back, head resting inches away from Ryou's toes. "Whose subconscious was it? Yours or mine, do you think?"

"You were... _really _there?"

"Chariots, horses, inexplicable mutations of the shoulder blades... yes, I was there." He props up his head in his hand, locking his gaze with Ryou's. Harsh enough to _sear, _quasi-transparency notwithstanding. "You _fled,_" he says, almost petulantly.

"I couldn't stop," whispers Ryou. It was a _dream_. "What happened after I... flew away?"

Bakura smiles – the wide, narrow, toothy smile of a serpent. "I fell, of course," he says. "Into eternity."

**Symposium**

They lie together, back to back on the bed: Yugi reading a duellist's magazine; Yami staring contentedly at the wall, counting the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to its surface. Both are curled over slightly, like two opposite-facing semicircles, joined at the very edge of the curve. Yami can feel the ridges of Yugi's spine pressing gently into his own, as though they are very lightly connected. He imagines light pulsing through Yugi's veins and trickling into his own, tingling as it rushes through.

The airy silence is shattered by a rustle of blankets as, lazily, Yami rolls over to face the other. Softly, he places his hands on Yugi's warm shoulders, causing him to jump and tense.

"Wha! – other me! You scared me!" Giggling, he relaxes, and tilts his head backwards so that it rests in the hollow of Yami's shoulder. Turns another page of the magazine, with the crackle of page against glossy page. He leans even further back so that his eyes meet the corner of Yami's. "... What?"

The setting sun casts a slender rectangle of light halfway across the bed, through the window, clothing them in a partial film of warmth. A glass prism hanging just below the blinds throws fragments of light on every surface; little mosaic pieces of colour, scattered on the side of the wardrobe, on the surface of the desk, on the edge of Yugi's T-shirt. It is as though they are in the centre of a faceted piece of glass themselves, lost in a sharp sea of refracted shapes and colours – safe, and happily enclosed in their haven.

"I heard a story, once. Recently," murmurs Yami. "About when people came fused in pairs." They are virtually tessellated - one looking upwards, one looking down, joined by the eyes.

"I know that one," says Yugi, smiling. "With four arms, four legs, and one face on each side."

"Children of the sun," says Yami, musingly.

"Yeah. That's us." Yugi wriggles, burrowing his head closer to Yami. His hair brushes the edge of his jaw, like sunlight made solid. Their bare toes touch.

For a while, they stay like that, motionless and heavy with languor. Yugi's fingers gradually loosen their grip on the magazine until it falls, tumbling to the floor in a hushed ripple of pages. Eyes half-lidded, smiling at one another.

"You have homework to do," says Yami, eventually.

"Later," says Yugi.

"All right."

More contented silence, like multicoloured rays of light dancing around what little space there is between them.

"How much do you think it hurt?" asks Yami, after considerable reflection.

Yugi twists around, managing, after a brief tussle with the tangled blankets, to face him directly. That done, he inches closer, rebuilding their previous proximity. Foot to foot and forehead to forehead, they form an irregular oval. "Did what hurt?"

"... Separation."

Yugi crinkles his nose. "A lot, probably."

"Probably. Probably it was agony."

"You're gloomy!"

Yami slides his fingers along Yugi's sides, pushing at his T-shirt until it rides halfway up his chest.

"H-hey! Yami, that tickles!" Yugi squirms, laughing uncontrollably. Yami chuckles too.

Carefully, he draws his hand around, tracing Yugi's navel. "This is the mark they left, as a reminder. Otherwise, you would never guess."

Yugi's giggles gradually subside. He breathes. "You'd guess anyway," he says. "Either way, I'm glad we're back together again. It's sad, the idea of being a lonely little half. Silly gods. It was a mean thing to do."

Yami tweaks his nose, gently. "Careful, or they'll become furious and cut you in half again. You'll be hopping on one foot."

"Four would be even more difficult to find," says Yugi, with a trace of regret. "Two's hard enough."

"Two is just fine."

"Yeah. Two is good."

Yami rests a thumb on Yugi's lower lip, soft, and rough, and warm. "Two is one."


End file.
